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A U.K. COVID patient has told of his experience living with what experts have called the longest active COVID-19 infection to date.
Dave Smith, 72, from Bristol, England, had COVID for almost 10 months in an infection which saw him "down to death's door" a number of times, according to The Guardian newspaper.
Smith's infection, which lasted around 300 days, saw him record 42 positive PCR tests. He was also admitted to hospital seven times.
Smith's infection finally waned for good after he was given a mixture of the antibodies casirivimab and imdevimab, in a medicine developed by pharmaceutical company Regeneron.
He finally tested negative for the virus months after his initial infection in March 2020. He has since gone shopping and traveled to the U.K. coastline for a vacation.
His case is set out in a non peer-reviewed paper, "Chronic SARS-CoV-2 infection and viral evolution in a hypogammaglobulinaemic individual," available on the medRxiv.org preprint platform.
Smith has spoken out about his difficult experience living with COVID for such a long period of time, with his health up and down unpredictably.
He told The Guardian: "At one point I was bedridden for two or three months. My wife had to wash and shave me in bed because I just couldn't stand up.
"Sometimes I thought, I wish they'd take me in the middle of the night, because I just can't go on any more. You get to the point where you are more afraid of living than you are of dying."
Scientists used genetic sequencing to show that Smith had the same virus infection rather than being re-infected with a different one.
At times, Smith's health deteriorated so much that he would call family members "to make peace with them." He said his wife started to arrange a funeral five times.
"Whenever I went bad, I went really bad—down to death's door," he added.
Smith's health slowly began to improve over the course of weeks, once doctors administered the Regeneron antibody therapy. He tested negative for COVID on a PCR test about 45 days later, 311 days in total since his infection began.
The Regeneron therapy is not yet approved for use in the U.K. It was given to Smith due to the severity of his case.
Smith had recently received chemotherapy treatment for leukemia in 2019, and doctors noted he was hypogammaglobulinaemic—he had reduced antibody levels—when he was admitted to hospital with COVID.
The U.K.'s ITV News reports Smith's case is due to be presented by University of Bristol and National Health Service researchers to the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in July, who describe his case as "the longest infection recorded in the literature to date."
The Bristol/NHS research paper concludes that immunosuppressed patients "are vulnerable to chronic persistent SARS-CoV-2 infection" and that "studies of potential therapies are urgently required."
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